Donaldson drove ammo for record-setting 45th Infantry

Nov. 21, 2011

Ray Donaldson

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EDITOR'S NOTE:This story is another installment in a series of occasional stories featuring veterans of the Twin Lakes Area. The intent of the series is to honor the military men and women who served and to expand The Bulletin'scapacity as a source of information on veterans for future generations. The series covers all aspects of service at home and abroad — from mail call to the mess hall to the battle front. To suggest veteran candidates for this series, e-mail the newsroom at newsroom@baxterbulletin.com or call (870) 508-8050.

Ray Donaldson turned 21 years old on June 20, 1943, on a Navy ship headed for the northern coast of Algeria.

He and other members of the 189th Field Artillery Battalion, along with the entire Army's 45th Infantry, would practice one time an amphibious landing on Algeria's shores in preparation for war against the German Army on Sicily.

He had received the call from Uncle Sam just weeks earlier.

"I didn't get to celebrate on the ship or have my first drink or nothin'," said Donaldson during an interview at his home in Mountain Home. Three weeks after his birthday, Donaldson and comrades would confront the Germans on Sicily. That was his first big dose of wartime anxiety.

"When we hit Sicily, it was all a new game for us," said Donaldson. Under the command of Gen. George S. Patton, the Army roared across the island. Those were the first days of 511 days of combat — a modern wartime record that still belongs to the 45th Infantry. Donaldson said he and many other soldiers in the 45th saw all 511 days of the action. The 45th was at work in the European Theater for nearly 30 months. Some 27,000 soldiers in the 45th fell.

Donaldson was an ammunition truck driver in the convoys that delivered the big shells to the artillery lines.

Days after Sicily, the 45th began a march up the east coast of Italy, liberating cities and villages along the way.

On D-Day, the 45th held positions and turned to the south for a few days waiting for the German Army fleeing from the Normandy Invasion. They never showed.

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Northbound, driving the German Army from Anzio, Italy, Donaldson saw his first fresh American casualties lying dead along the roadside. The convoys of the 189th ran day and night then. In close battle, a German tank column once broke through infantry lines and the men in the artillery convoy had to dig foxholes and take cover for one long night.

"At daylight the next day, I stuck my head out and there was a dud 88 (millimeter) anti-tank shell right there by me," said Donaldson. "That didn't make me feel too good."

In another hot battle, a live 88-millimeter projectile hit about 20 feet away from his foxhole and bored underground to within 5 feet of the foxhole where he had taken cover. The force of the blast went upward and his foxhole held together, he said.

Late in the war in Italy and Germany, the Army was authorized to take command of homes for rest whenever possible. Many residents didn't like that at all, said Donaldson. He recalled one Italian man so angered by the order to vacate that he kicked and abused a soon-to-be mother dachshund in the process of leaving. Against Army regulations, Donaldson took the dog that soon delivered a litter of four pups. The dogs were Donaldson's companions in combat until near the end of the war. Three of the dogs were taken in by other soldiers. The one Donaldson kept had a fatal run-in with a wire-haired terrier during a stay in another German home. He keeps several pictures of Lady and her litter in his war albums.

Donaldson recalled that in rural Germany his outfit once was welcomed by a German family. Donaldson said deer were plentiful in that area of the German countryside and the soldiers took a deer in a hunt guided by a young man of the cordial German family.

"We didn't taste meat for so long we forgot what it tasted like," said Donaldson.

During the hunt, the fellow surprised U.S. soldiers with a demonstration of expert marksmanship. Before the soldiers and the family parted, he disclosed that he had been a marksman in the German Rear Guard and was absent without leave from the German Army.

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Donaldson said he feels lucky that he came home from the war with little more than a bum knee from a collision with a stump in the dark while running for a foxhole. He said he understands the emotional scars borne by the soldiers in the trenches.

"I can understand the boys up front. They were getting shot at 24 hours a day," he said.

Still, ammunition convoys were a favorite target of the German fighter pilots. The frequent strafing runs somehow always just missed him in the truck he drove. Once the big bullets peppered the steel cargo bed of the empty truck he was driving.

"One round in the load of artillery I carried, and I would've been history," said Donaldson. Others close by in the ammunition convoys weren't so lucky. He recalled once a German artillery shell hit a jeep in the convoy just in front of his truck.

The convoy stopped, and he checked on the two soldiers who were thrown from the Jeep.

"They were out cold," Donaldson said. Medics and ambulances were on the way and the convoy kept moving.

Patton was notorious for pushing the 45th to fight around the clock. Donaldson said he was among the soldiers on the ground in Italy who coined the phrase: "Our blood. His guts." That was the GI response to Patton's then-new nickname "Old Blood and Guts". Most soldiers of the 45th were relieved when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower relieved Patton of his commission, he said.

Donaldson said he nursed the bum knee without seeing a medic until the end of the war. Stateside, the injury landed him in a military hospital in Galesburg, Ill., where he met a pretty nurse, Janice Luther, from Marshal Town, Iowa. They married on June 7, 1946, and recently celebrated a 58th wedding anniversary.

Donaldson said he had one brush with celebrity during his war stint. Pulling KP duty in the officer's quarters on the ship in the Atlantic, Donaldson said he poured a lot of coffee for the famous WWII cartoonist Bill Mauldin. Traveling with the 45th, Mauldin and Donaldson came to be friends and greeted each other by first name, he said.

The 45th Infantry Division took the fight against the German Army all the way across Sicily, up Italy, France and finally to Germany to Hitler's Alpine lodge. Along the way, Patton would proclaim the 45th "... one of the best if not, actually, the best division in the history of U.S. arms."

Of the German Army, Donaldson said: "When they were on the run, it was hard keeping up with them."

EDITOR'S NOTE:This story originally published in The Baxter Bulletin May 31, 2004, edition. Donaldson passed away Jan. 9, 2007. He is buried at Baxter Memorial Gardens. At his passing, Donaldson had been married for 60 years to Janice Mae Luther, a U.S. Army nurse, now of Mountain Home.